The minute Gary Abernathy began appearing on the pages of the Post as an apologist for Donald Trump, I anointed him as America’s Chief Yahoo. After all, the man is a writer by trade and a former newspaper editor and is capable of writing coherent English paragraphs. Those credentials put him a cut above the average Trump yahoo—and have allowed him to write this quintessential example of Trumpian yahooism, characterized by obfuscation, misleading statements, and selective use of facts.

The Republicans’ picking up Senate seats shows Trump’s strength? No, it shows the Republicans exploiting three endemic flaws in our political system to gain unwarranted advantage: 1) the disproportionate power a minority can gain from the working of the archaic Constitutional grant of two Senate seats to each State; 2) the Republicans’ horrendous misuse of gerrymandering to frustrate majority rule; 3) the benefits derived from the GOP’s decades-long effort to suppress the minority vote, mightily deployed again this year.

Like the true Trumpian demagogue he is, Abernathy completely ignores the overriding fact about the 2018 elections: Democrats won an overwhelming majority of the popular vote in both the House and Senate races, despite Republicans’ tying their hands with the above ropes! And even more: despite a booming economy!

Abernathy also ignores the main reason the rest of us are fed up with Trump’s Republican yahoo hinterland: they enthusiastically embraced a campaign based on racism, xenophobia, and white nationalism (i.e., supremacy), fueled by demagoguery full of fear-mongering, hate-mongering, and race-baiting. Brought to us by a Republican Party that has brought us the most corrupt Presidential administration ever and daily tramples on the Constitution, the rule of law, and our common democratic and moral values.

You Republican flyover yahoos want respect? Earn it by giving up your racist, xenophobia, ignorant ways. First steps: stop the Tweets and stop the serial lying.

More on What the Republican Yahoos Need to Do

What a smug, self-deluded apologia for Donald Trump Abernathy has produced. Far from offering a rational defense of Trump, Abernathy has unintentionally revealed what it is in the hearts and minds of flyover Republicans that make them so repulsive. You hinterland yahoos want recognition and respect? Here’s how to earn it:

-Stop Trump’s obnoxious,insulting Tweets.
-Stop Trump’s daily lies, especially the Hitler-level demagogic ones he tells about Hispanic migrants
-Get rid of your racist, xenophobic, misogynist, white supremacist attitudes that fueled the rise of Donald Trump and and that you vividly showed by loudly applauding Trump every time he displayed them in every speech he made during the 2018 campaign
-Get Trump to tell the truth about Kahshoggi’s murder and take the appropriate retaliation against the one who ordered it
-Stop Trump from praising Vladimir Putin and every other brutal dictator in the world while insulting America’s most faithful allies
-Get Trump to release his income tax records
-Stop Trump from wrecking the American economy and sending the stock market plunging with his misguided trade war
-Stop Trump’s defiance of the emoluments clause
-Get Trump to clean up his massively corrupt administration

Next, you flyover yahoos should get Trump to apologize for:
-Committing serial adultery, (and pledge he will never do it again)
-Praising neo–Nazi demonstrators in Charlottesville
-Lying about Obama’s place of birth
-Calling foreign countries s—tholes
-Calling Omarosa a dog
-Calling Megyn Kelly a bimbo
-Demeaning John McCain’s military service
-Mocking a handicapped person

In short, my yahoo friends, stop your support for the vulgar, crude, bully Trump and his assault on America’s basic democratic and moral values–and common human decency–and join your fellow Americans in upholding America’s traditional Christian values. We are about at the point where we will never forgive you.